Yep, 'Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' Is Based On A Real Person, Says Creator Amy Sherman-Palladino

"She's her own gal," Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, tells Women's Health of the gal she's made her own, Midge Maisel. That's true—to a point. Despite many comparisons made to renowned mid-century comediennes like Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers (both of whom either already do or one day will exist in the Maisel-verse, according to Sherman-Palladino and her husband/Maisel executive producer Dan Palladino), Midge isn't based on any of the real women who once upon a time knocked the comedy world on its overwhelmingly male ass simply by telling jokes in a dress. But she is based on a real person: Sherman-Palladino's father, Don Sherman. "It's weird, but it's true," she says.

"We worship every single one of them, but she's not really based on any of those characters."

"[As for] all those women—obviously, you think of them. You tip your hat to them because they were the pioneers, the groundbreakers," Sherman-Palladino continues. "We worship every single one of them, but she's not really based on any of those characters."

Instead, the character for Midge—a beautiful, young mother of two and brisket-cooking-housewife-turned-stand-up-comedian, played by Rachel Brosnahan—was inspired by stories Sherman and "his cronies," as Palladino calls them, told his daughter and later son-in-law.

Like Midge, Don Sherman was a stand-up comedian in 1950s New York.

"Once he [Sherman] moved to L.A., all his cronies would sit around and talk about the good old days in New York," Dan Palladino explains. "...That was really stand-up comedy central during the '40s and '50s and going into the '60s." (Indeed, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel takes place in the late 1950s going into the 1960s.)

Those were the days when "music and comedy kind of went hand in hand," he continues, often in a "basket house" (a la The Gaslight Cafe in New York City and The Gaslight in Maisel season one), where unpaid performers would pass around a basket in hopes that audience members would fill it with money.

"Comedians would open for jazz singers. Amy's dad opened for the singer Dinah Washington. He opened for Johnny Mathis. He opened for a lot of musical entertainers," explains Palladino. "Through his experience, we got to know the highs and lows of a working comic. And we certainly got to know [it] up close—like, Amy grew up with it—but I got to see it from a more objective place."

Sherman's real-life experience gave the Maisel team uncanny insight into the mind of a comic.

From hearing Sherman's war stories, the couple got "to learn the psychology of a working stand-up comic," says Dan Palladino, which invariably informed not only Midge's character, but also her trajectory in the show.

But the "lessons" didn't end with Psych 101. They also learned "what it means to try to be funny," as well as "how hard it is to turn that off" when it's time for the spotlight to shine on someone else. Sherman also taught them the inherent difficulties of putting yourself in a position to be judged and how, when that ruling falls in your favor, you can become used to being the center of attention, no matter where you are, says Dan Palladino.

Ultimately, Midge Maisel is in a league of her own.

"A lot of that [Midge's character] is drawn from Don, and some of it's drawn from stand-ups that we've known over the years," he adds. "And...while there's a bit of all these female comics in Midge, there's not a lot in Midge. We've kind of made her up out of whole cloth."

And, in fact, that may just be exactly what makes Mrs. Maisel so marvelous. "It's great for us to have no one story that we're following for her," says Dan Palladino, "because we can take her wherever we want."

This article was originally published on WomensHealthMag.com.